How to Find Images to Use on Your Blog Posts Legally

Finding images for your blog posts seems like a straight enough endeavor, right? Go to Google, put in some keywords to search, download the pictures and then use them on your WordPress blog right?

Not so fast. Doing this can land you in some trouble with the person or entity that owns the photos or graphics. You may be able to get away with using a photo without permission for a while, but you could also get some nasty letters and legal action brought against you.

I know a friend that had to settle out of court for a little over $700 after she used a photo owned by Getty without permission. There are tons of similar stories out there, so why risk getting in trouble and why risk all the hassle?

In today's video, I discuss the issues surrounding using images without permission, and how you can find copyright-free images to use in your blog posts, legally.

If you're too busy to watch the video, too bad. Let's just suffice it to say that there's a little-known trick to use Google to find images that are licensed for use on your blog post.

But because you're a good blogger and are using WordPress to run your blog (right?), you can also skip the video and check out another blog post I wrote about a WordPress plugin that solves this whole issue of acquiring images.

The plugin is called Imageinject; with it, you can search for images and insert them directly into and from your blog post; you can find my write-up about it here. But the video above has the method you can use to get images from Google to use in your blog posts legally.